DVD-Learn To Play Blues Mandolin

Description

Bluegrass players, from Bill Monroe onward, incorporated blues licks into their playing. Steve James knows this music and its history well, and he brings it clearly into focus on this fun and funky lesson.

Mandolin novices will start out by learning a basic G scale and how to alter it to create a blues scale. After demonstrating his pick strokes and tremolo technique, Steve dives right into Divin' Duck Blues by the great Yank Rachell. Steve and John Sebastian, another jug band and blues enthusiast, perform the tune, and then Steve takes it apart, note-by-note.

Steve lays out some of the primary blues chords on the mandolin, showing how it can become a wonderful accompanying instrument with the use of partial chords for rhythm comping. Turnarounds, double stops and variations on a walking boogie-woogie line are all essential parts of a blues repertoire, and Steve shows several of these, including a variation he learned directly from the legendary Howard Armstrong.

From there he launches into some powerful and challenging songs, each one of which shows you something new on the instrument. The Lonesome Train That Carried My Gal Away, from the recordings of Charlie McCoy and the Mississippi Sheiks, is a good-time tune that Steve plays on banjo-mandolin while John accompanies him on 6-string banjo. Big Joe Williams' Juanita Stomp is played on a "high-strung" mandolin (the lower strings are tuned to octaves) and features a rockin' blues riff in A. Steve's raucous original, Saturday Night in Jail, contains double stops, chord comps, blues licks and scales and, as Steve puts it, "fun-lovin' high-jinks." Steve and John close the lesson with a performance of Shotgun Blues, which Steve plays on an electric mandolin that once belonged to Yank Rachell.

Customer Reviews:

Another goodie from Home Spun.......2007-01-15

I own several Home Spun instructional CDs and DVDs. I enjoy them all, and they've made me a better musician.

This is another good one. James explores the music of Yank Rachell, breaks down a couple of tunes, and then plays and sings for us. I've also taken some of the techniques James decribes and applied them to other tunes.

You could easily spend an entire day or even a weekend studying and playing what's included on this DVD, which I think makes it well worth the $20. I mean, where alse can you take a music lesson and spend all the time you want with the teacher for only twenty bucks?

Also try the Home Spun Sam Bush DVDs. Awesome stuff. Com'on, you couldn't hire Sam Bush to be your teacher, but here you can have several hours of him, and play the DVDs over and over.

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